The Sky Around My Father: winner of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition

by Emilie Jelinek

Overview

The Sky Around My Father charts the estrangement between a daughter and her charismatic but often terrifying father. With nuance and precision, these poems bear witness to a childhood shaped by fear, love and music – where admiration and foreboding uneasily coexist. Drawing on the language of Eastern European fairytales, folk music, chess and meteorology, Emilie Jelinek’s sequence explores the mythic and monstrous dimensions of paternal absence. The observing moon, recurring throughout, becomes a quiet symbol of grief and longing, bridging distance with light. Through a textured blend of anecdotal and compressed lyric poems, ther sequence captures the reverberations of trauma and tenderness alike. At once intimate and archetypal, The Sky Around My Father confronts the deep complexities of the father-daughter bond – its beauty, its terror, and its lasting weather.

Winner of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2024

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780377803
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	09/23/2025
Series:	Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition Winners , #3
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Emilie Jelinek won the 2024 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker with her second pamphlet, The Sky Around My Father (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2025), following her debut, Wing Formula (Against the Grain Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Ambit, Finished Creatures, 14 magazine, Mslexia, Resurgence, Under the Radar and Ireland’s Munster Literary Review, Southword: New International Writing. She won second prize in both the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2023 and the Wells Open Poetry Prize in 2024, where she also received the Hilly Cansdale Award. She was a finalist in Mslexia’s Poetry Competition in 2023 and was highly commended in the Belfast Book Festival’s Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry and the McLellan Poetry Competition in 2022. She was awarded a distinction for her MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa Universityin 2023. She grew up in Belgium and France and has spent her career working for international organisations in Russia, Afghanistan, Haiti, Myanmar and West Africa, returning to the UK in 2014. She lives in Bath with her husband and two children.

Editorial Reviews

Emilie Jelinek crafts a set of poems heavy with storm warnings, stalked by the presence of the father who carries a burden of rage passed down generations, ‘a man cut in half by history’. Even in their brief moments of harmony, she deftly moves from safety to threat, introducing the idea of language - not just Czech but the language of music or domestic speech or family interaction - as part of his storm-battered terrain, ‘a hill I climb/for years.’ Through the ever-narrowing landscape of the man she knows, she contrives to suggest, with great skill and delicacy, not only a daughter’s pain and struggle to comprehend, but a whole nation’s turbulent history. — Imtiaz Dharker

'In these elegant and unflinching poems, Emilie Jelinek sets out on a voyage of exploration, through storm and rough weather, to the land of her father. This is beautiful work: unafraid to examine how love, history and grief can painfully intertwine, and those we long for become unreachable to us.' — Liz Berry

‘These poems are exemplary in the measured way they answer Emilie Jelinek's need for a reckoning with her troubled and violent father. The recorded facts may be shocking, but through a variety of approaches and devices, including sometimes surprising but always apt metaphor, both justice and a degree of mercy are achieved. A new, true poet rests her case.’ — Christopher Reid

'Emilie Jelinek’s forthright, highly courageous collection The Sky Around My Father is a hymn to unsolvable complexity – the father is enormous, unnegotiable:  he is the manspreading presence in the long shadow of whom a furious /perplexed / disbelieving daughter attempts to find the most forgiving angle, the '…place where tenderness might grow.' Jelinek makes the dynamic entirely her own – the father gets in the way of everything: her poems cut their pathway around, then through him. Undercutting this sequence of love poems – because that’s exactly what they are – is a terrible ambivalence. With its exquisitely rendered variations, this is a first-rate collection that significantly adds to the dysfunctional father canon.’ — Tim Liardet

From the Publisher